I have been using Linux as my primary desktop environment for a long time. It can be impractical, annoying, even infuriating.

But it’s still my favorite operating system, and over the years I have grown accustom to its quirks and shortcomings. I also suffer from an occasional obsessive disorder with regards to problem solving. Specifically trivial, unimportant problems. Such was the case two weeks ago when I decided to ditch a virtual Linux environment running in Mac OS for a native Linux install. Don’t get me wrong, running Linux using a virtual environment like Parallels is a pleasant and pretty smooth experience. I felt however that it should be snappier, should run faster on the super slick Mac hardware, so I innocently decided to dual-boot the machine and compare a native Linux install to what Parallels provides.

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Scott An Aid To Clinical Surgery Latest Edition Of Sports. It took a wee bit longer than I hoped to get things working as well as I wanted, but I’m happy to say the effort has been worth while. Here is a summary of things learned so far running Linux on a Macbook Pro 10,1. For the most part these are not distro specific, and I’m not using any high level configuration tools from a desktop environment like Gnome or KDE.

• Installation There are plenty of how-tos out there to get the installation bits figured out. I’m a Debian man myself, so I found a useful jumping off point. The tips with regards to rEFInd and getting the wireless card to work during the installation process where very useful, and within an hour or two I had a bootable Debian Sid/Unstable setup, without any breakage to Mac OS. • Temperature In my experience laptops running Linux tend to run hot, and this Macbook is no exception.

Before tweaking a few things it was consistently 10 C degrees warmer than in Mac OS, and would quickly raise to out-of-control hot when doing any CPU intensive work (I triggered CPU temp throttling with a make -j8 in less than a minute). I tried a number of things to reduce the temperature and managed to find two that help bring things back into Mac OS comparable levels. First is to use the Intel Pstate kernel driver for CPU scaling. The only tweaking required is to disable CPU “turbo” mode as the driver is IMHO too liberal with frequency ranges over the normal non-turbo maximum.

This eliminates conditions spiraling to dangerous levels when all the cores are pegged. Secondly I’m running a simple Bash script from root’s crontab every minute that does a core temp evaluation and adjusts the minimum fan speed if required. This brings down the average idle temp with negligible additional fan noise. This requires the standard kernel coretemp driver as well as the applesmc kernel module.

• Power To date the best estimated battery life value I have seen under Linux is 5 hours (I have not run an actual timed test yet) as compared to 7.5 in Mac OS. After some acpid rules fiddling I managed to scale the CPU to 75% of max and dim the display significantly when the power is unplugged.